Fenway Park Facts

Red Sox dugout is on the 1st base side. The bullpens are located behind the right field fence.

Elevation: 20 feet above sea level.

Site of the 1999, 1961 (II) and 1946 All-Star games.

Seats made of oak.

1976 electronic scoreboard significantly altered the wind currents.

43 private 28-seat rooftop boxes added in 1984.

Duffy’s Cliff was a 10-foot-high mound which formed an incline in front of the left field wall from 1912 to 1933, extending from the left-field foul pole to the flag pole in center; named after the Red Sox’s Duffy Lewis, the acknowledged master of defensive play on the cliff. It was greatly reduced but not completely eliminated in 1934.

A ladder starts near the upper-left corner of the scoreboard, 13 feet above ground, and rises to the top of the Green Monster; this allows the groundskeeper to remove batting-practice home run balls from the netting above the wall.

Behind the manual scoreboard in left field is a room where the walls are covered with signatures of players that have played left field through the years.

Scoreboard numbers - runs and hits: 16 inches by 16 inches, 3 pounds; errors, innings, pitcher’s numbers: 12 inches by 16 inches, 2 pounds.

No ball has ever been hit over the right-field roof.

Home run balls that hit uprights above the left-field wall were declared in play by the umpires.

Wooden bleachers stood in foul territory down the left field line in the 1910s and 1920s but burned down on May 8, 1926. The charred remains were removed, increasing the size of foul territory there. Wooden bleachers were completed in center and right-center for the 1912 World Series.

Infield grass was transplanted from Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds to Fenway in 1912.

During the winter of 1933-1934, all of the wooden grandstands were replaced with concrete and steel. A big fire on January 5, 1934, destroyed much of what had already been built, but all was finished for the season opener on April 17, 1934.

In 1936 a 23-foot, 7-inch net was placed atop the wall in left to protect windows on Landsdowne Street.

Wind usually helps the batters. A new pressbox built in the late 1980s above home plate causes wind swirl that pushes foul balls back into fair territory.

When tin covered the 2-by-4s on the left-field wall, balls hitting the tin over the 2-by-4s had a live bounce, but balls hitting between the 2-by-4s were dead and just dropped straight down.

In 1940, in an effort to help Ted Williams hit home runs, the Red Sox added the right-field bullpens, known as Williamsburg, which reduced the distance to the fence by 23 feet.

A seat in the right field bleachers is painted red to mark the spot where longest measurable home run ever hit inside Fenway Park landed. Ted Williams hit the home run on June 9, 1946 off Fred Hutchinson of the Detroit Tigers. It was measured at 502 feet and supposedly crashed through the straw hat of the man sitting in the seat (Section 42, Row 37, Seat 21).

The 1946 roof boxes were replaced in 1982.

The screen behind home plate, designed to protect fans and allow foul balls to roll back down onto the field of play, was the first of its kind in the majors.

Left-field scoreboard, installed on the wall in 1934, moved 20 feet to the right in 1976.

The low concrete base of the left- and center-field walls was padded after the 1975 World Series, during which Fred Lynn crashed into the concrete wall in center.

The left-field foul line was measured by Art Keefe and George Sullivan, authors of The Picture History of the Boston Red Sox, in October 1975 as 309 feet, 5 inches. On October 19, 1975, the Boston Globe used aerial photography and measured it at 304.779 feet. Osborn Engineering Co. blueprints document the distance at 308 feet. In 1995, the Red Sox, with no fanfare, revised the distance to left field to 310 feet.

Retired Red Sox uniform numbers hung in right field in numerical order: Bobby Doerr (1) in 1988, Joe Cronin (4) in 1984, Carl Yastrzemski (8) in 1989, Ted Williams (9) in 1984 and Carlton Fisk (27) in 2000.

On June 13, 2005, in a ceremony before the Red Sox played the Cincinnati Reds at Fenway Park for the first time since the 1975 World Series, the left field foul pole was named "Fisk Pole." The ceremony honored Carlton Fisk, who hit the famous home run just inside the pole to win the 6th game of the series.